a note from max
Hello,
I'm hiring an ex-Palantir FDE. Which means I'm asking you to leave the only company that has ever built this role properly — so you're owed an actual case, not a job description. Here's mine:
- Our landing page. Not slop — a thoughtful view of how we see ourselves and the industry.
- The unedited internal thread about this role. Including our CEO telling me a job posting is the wrong way to hire you, and me getting talked out of half my own ideas. You're reading the posting anyway, so one of us was right.
- Our CEO's blog post about FDEs. It's ostensibly about Palantir but goes to the root of how we view this role.
You'd be the first — not the first of a program, the first, the one the flywheel starts with. You'd work directly with me, and the version of this role that exists here in two years is mostly whatever you and I make it.
Interested? Email me at max@textql.com — that's my inbox, not a pipeline. Tell me why we're wrong above, and show me something you've built that people actually use.
Max
What the work actually is
Three months ago I ran a workshop with senior leaders at one of the payors we work with, onboarding them onto a provider claims anomaly root cause analysis application. I'd spent three weeks building this side-by-side with the subject matter experts in the cost of care department, and had been sweating about this presentation for days. 30 minutes in, one of the leaders pointed out that a fundamental definition we'd baked into the ontology was completely wrong and rendered the application useless. I was mortified. I fumbled my way through the rest of the workshop, promising to fix it and have it ready asap.
I spent the next 3 hours in a fire drill, ripping out and rewriting what was broken. I convinced the right people to have another session, and after a few more dev cycles can now say happily that 15 people are using it daily to drive decisions that affect millions of dollars of P&L.
I led this project 4 months after I joined TextQL. I conceived of it, studied for it like a final, built it, polished it, shared it, watched people test it, and then fell on my face for it. Now I get to look back on its eventual success, and feel good that I can draw a direct thread between my work and making these people's work better.
At TextQL we scrap projects that don't have this level of impact, and don't build things that sit on a shelf. Your cycle times will be short. A broken component found at 10:30am and fixed by 2pm isn't an anomaly. The person who finds it, the person who owns it, and the person who can change it are the same person. While we work toward initiatives on the order of years, meaningful payoff happens daily.
We're building the AI systems that come next, the last software these organizations ever deploy, in a world where the script hasn't yet been written.
No YOE requirements. We care about judgment, slope, and ownership.
- $305K+ (base + equity ~ 12bps + variable)
- Best in class benefits
- 5 days in office in NYC (exceptions made for exceptional people)
- Very short hiring turnaround